onsdag 11 december 2013

Most of us have embraced the ability to search on-line, not all have found the hidden internet-services available for free.

During my evening class in geneology I got a Skype-call from a friend in Oregon, Andrea Patersson. I enjoyed her and her daughter's company last summer when I showed them around her husbands ancestral area. I also was happy to be able to help them out with information on possible living relatives in south Sweden. Andrea confirmed at this call that they had made contact and she was thrilled! Possibly this would not have been such a success if it wasn't for the new technologies.

The same comments could be made on a conversation I had today with Barry Erickson in New Zealand. His ancestors made the long trip to NZ in the 1870's and with some swedish family members and geneology friends we managed to arrange a family reunion during Barry's and his wife's visit to Sweden .

As Barry said, thanks to e-mail correspondance and Skype he has collected a lot of information not only from Sweden but also from Australia and other places the ancestors spread to.

The GF - Genealogical Society - in Stockholm - have had two very interesting lectures on DNA-geneology. The talks were also launched on Internet at:

The method used when scanning books is described in an earlier blogpost. And we must again tell you how impressed we are of the freeware "Scantailor" which helps us to produce a nice result.

"Scan Tailor is an interactive tool for post-processing of scanned pages. It gives the ability to cut or crop pages, compensate for skew angle, and add / delete content fields and margins, among others. You begin with raw scans, and end up with tiff's that are ready for printing or assembly in PDF or DjVu file."

GOOGLE TRANSLATE

National Archives began in 2003 a large-scale digitization of records. High resolution images are created for long-term preservation in the TIFF file format and image stock amounts to about 150 million images , of which about 70 million images are available online.

To make it practical to take some of these pictures on the net another less bandwidth-intensive file format have been used. National Archives chose to convert TIFF images to file format DjVu , developed at AT & T Laboratories in 1996. In order to take advantage of the images , the user must install a free DjVu plug-in (plug-in software) into their browser .

Recently, there has been a problem for Mac users to access DjVu images. The problem is because the company that develops DjVu does not prioritize new versions of the plug-in software at the same rate as Apple launches new versions of operating systems and browsers . DjVu format also has limitations when it comes to getting access to the National Archives' digital images from a variety of mobile devices such as e-readers.

The National Archives has begun work aimed at replacing DjVu . It will involve a large amount of work and has therefore been divided into a feasibility study and an implementation of projects that are a priority in 2014.